Blown Out Of Proportion

There's something about this job and maybe the people that get drawn to corrections that on occasion makes them want to blow things completely out of proportion.

There was an incident last night with old Dip Set up in C-wing. They were doing med pass and since his door was open and he had a captive audience, he decided to proselytize a little bit.

And just a little bit of his proselytizing goes a long way, believe me. Plus he tends to eat toothpaste alot so it looks like he has got rabies or something.

Anyway, he's standing there at the door and he has his meds in his hand and is ranting and raving just as fast as he can because he knows any second they are going to shut his door and his audience is going to walk away. While he is in the midst of his vociferous rant, a fleck of spittle flies out of his mouth and hits Miss Nancynurse on the cheek. He didn't do it on purpose, it just happened.

Well, body fluid contact with an inmate is rather a big deal in prison. Understandably. A report was made, both on paper and verbally to the lieutenant. Nancynurse washed her face. And since it was an accident, we all figured the thing was done.

That's what we get for thinking.

During the night or in the morning, someone saw the report of the incident and misread what was said. It looked like he intentionally spit on the nurse and that we did nothing about it.

And as soon as we got there the snit hit the fan.

Well, other things were going on at the time, but it was trouble enough.

The bastards made me run again. Called a 10-5 down in the Hive just as Chuck came in and was getting a snack for his lunch. We both dropped our stuff and headed for the door. I had to dodge around a lieutenant who wasn't moving fast enough. Almost knocked him down. And we ran almost all the way from central to the Hive before they said 10-6. An inmate got a bad case of the stupids and ended up getting sprayed and slammed. No staff were injured.

So there we both are, already all sweaty and out of breath before our shift actually began. And we had to walk all the way back up to central to get our stuff and then trudge back down to the Hive to get to work.

And the first thing they do in the middle of all this is get hold of Sarge and KP and make them spend the best part of an hour writing paperwork about what happened. And then Sarge had to got up to the Majors office and spend almost two hours explaining what his paperwork said.

All that work to explain something that didn't happen. A non-incident.

We try to tell them when things happen just to keep them in the loop so they will feel important. But sometimes I wonder why we even tell them anything at all. What we should do is unplug the phone, lock the gates and when they come down we will just shout "We got this! Go away! If we need you we will call you!"